A few years ago the creation of a Universal Translator akin to that seen in Star Trek would have seemed decades away. But then projects like Google Translate kept getting better, Google added conversation translation on Android, and more of us are getting used to talking to a device with natural language responses due to the release of Siri. A Universal Translator is starting to look possible in the very near future.

NTT DoCoMo is reinforcing that fact by announcing it is testing a new phone whose main feature is to translate conversations in almost real-time using the cloud. At the moment it only does translation between Japanese and English, but the pause between speaking and hearing the translated version is only 2 seconds. That means two people can have a natural conversation in their own language without really noticing the translation is occurring.

At the moment, some 400 people are trying out the service and DoCoMo is tweaking it to solve any problems that come up. Japanese accuracy is around 90%, where as English accuracy is slightly behind at 80%.

If you’re traveling to Japan this year there’s a chance you may get to try it out. Testing will end in March at which point hospitals, retailers, and tourist-specific services are going to pick it up for use. There’s also plans to release it as an actual service you can use on your existing phone, but that won’t arrive until later in the year.

Of course, this is nowhere near the ultimate translation system, but it is a step in the right direction. I look forward to the day I can speak to multiple people in English and they all hear me talking in their language without a phone in sight.